MARGARET DWYER: IN THE EYE OF THE STORY

WHEN Florence O’Connor finally decided to step down as the driving force of Festival of Kerry’s first decade in 1970, Margaret Dwyer was elected to replace him as President of the committee. It was a time of momentous change.

Jim Casey the General Secretary resigned, and he was replaced by young Ted Keane, whose late father had served as President before his untimely death. Margaret found that was unrest among some of her older contemporaries who resented the influence of some of the young tigers on the committee, especially Denis Reen and Dick O’Sullivan. They were making names for themselves as emerging forces, and she was proud of her role in facilitating them.

Margaret recognised that the festival was growing stale and needed an injection of new blood and new ideas and renewed drive and she recognised that tourism held real potential in boosting the economy of the Tralee area. It was her way of returning something to the community that had welcomed her over the past thirty years.

Born and reared in New York, she had immigrated to Ireland as a 29-year-old in 1948. This was the reverse of the normal trend in this country at that time. Her mother, who was born and reared in Tralee, had emigrated to New York in 1911.

Margaret came to Tralee on a holiday in 1948 with two young sons. Her husband had been killed fighting in Germany during the second world war, and she found that her war widow’s pension was three times the average industrial wage in Ireland at the time. While in New York she was working for Trans World Airlines (TWA), but most of her earnings were going on child minding services, so she decided Tralee was the place to raise her two boys on her own.

In 1970 the whole country was in transition as a result of the Northern troubles. She had discussions with American travel agents about setting up rose committees in a number of different American and Canadian centres.

With her distinctive New Yorker accent promoting an Irish festival, Margaret got ready access to the media in Canada and the United States. She was able to get publicity with media interviews in Calgary, Alberta; Great Falls, Montana; Winnipeg, Manitoba; Chicago; South Bend, Indiana; Cleveland, Ohio; Toronto, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.

This enhanced the festival’s influence within Bord Failte and Aer Lingus, because the organisation was able to help assuage some the damage done by the Northern troubles to tourism in the rest of the island. People abroad instinctively assumed that Ireland was so small that the violence was countrywide.

As a further promotional gimmick it was decided that Margaret Dwyer should fly to Dublin from the new airport in Farranfore in a small Cessna plane, owned by “Kerry Airways” and renamed the Rose of Tralee for the occasion. The arrival of the Roses in Dublin was extensively covered by all the national newspapers.

Margaret was supposed to fly back to Farranfore on the small plane, but Kerry airport was fog bound, and they had to divert to Shannon and had the hair-raising experience of hearing the air traffic controller in Shannon divert a transatlantic airline because, he said, he had lost the small plane on radar in the vicinity.

The festival came to a rather premature end in 1971 due to heavy rain. The forty-five minute fireworks display planned as the closing of the festival had to be called off. As a neighbourly gesture, the festival committee gave the £4,000 worth of fireworks to Listowel for their Harvest Festival later that month. This was to be the cause of some grief later.

Some children were injured when they found part of a firework that had not gone off properly. The Listowel committee washed its hands of any responsibility for the fireworks, and the Festival of Kerry was sued successfully, which added to the company’s growing insurance costs. Henceforth the festival tended to focus more firmly on Tralee, and this explains how it gradually developed more as the Rose of Tralee Festival, than the Festival of Kerry.

The exceptionally heavy rain led to serious flooding in Tralee in 1971. The main street of the town was essentially built over a river and the arches holding up the street were seriously damaged. As a result the street had to be pedestrianised as a safety precaution.

The local Chamber of Commerce had tried to make a virtue of necessity by making the area as attractive as possible with seats, flower tubs, umbrellas, and a portable fountain. As President of the Festival of Kerry, Margaret Dwyer was asked to launch the initiative officially, which was the only connection with the festival. But the Sunday Independent carried an article in November by the author Alice Curtayne, a native of Tralee, slating the Festival of Kerry for “the rape of The Mall.”

“This Festival is a justifiable tourist gimmick,” Curtayne she wrote. “Is everything to be suffered in the name of a tourist gimmick? When will people understand how offensive it is to underestimate in this way the intelligence, education and good taste of our visitors?”

Had she taken the trouble to inquire she would have learned that the predestrianization “was a safety measure taken by the public authority owing to the danger of the town arch collapsing under vehicular traffic,” Dan Nolan of The Kerryman complained. The Festival of Kerry had no more to do with the pedestrianisation of Bridge Street and The Mall than with “the pedestrianisation of Henry Street and Grafton Street in Dublin.”

Following the Bloody Sunday outrage in which fourteen civilians were slaughtered in Derry on January 30, 1972 and the burning of the British Embassy in Dublin in retaliation a few days later, prospects for the ensuing tourist season seemed particularly bleak. Éamonn Ceannt, the Director General of Bord Fáilte, actually asked Margaret Dwyer to work full time for Bord Fáilte. She would loved to have take on the challenge, but declined because it would have necessitated moving from Tralee, to where her elderly mother had retired from New York.

Linda McCravy of Miami, the 1971 Rose ov Tralee, returned to Ireland in May 1972 to tour this country and a visit to Britain on behalf of Bord Fáilta, which asked Margaret Dwyer to accompany her to Rose selection dances in Dublin and Waterford, as well as functions in Birmingham and London.

David Hanley — who was later celebrated as a television interviewer and presenter of RTÉ’s popular current affairs programme, Morning Ireland — parodied the Rose of Tralee in his novel, In Guilt and In Glory, which was based largely on his experiences working for Bord Fáilte. He wrote about a the fictional Cahirciveen Carrot Queen Festival.The judges of this fictional contest based their choice on “uprightness, intelligence and personality,” according to Hanley, “for the virtues of a good Carrot Queen were those not of the professional beauty, but of the good housewife.” The winner of that fictional contest was awarded “the Golden Carrot.”

Over the years in Tralee Margaret was known —largely behind her back— as “the merry widow.” She was aware of this and it never bothered her. In Hanley’s book the president of the Carrot Festival was a woman with a Brooklyn accent, described as “a third generation returned Yank named Mrs. Amelia Line, known to locals as the Widdah Line.” The various controversies surround the festival and the way that it was being parodied in a fictional way were a measure of its success. These were really a tribute to its success.